From the History of the ‘Clinical Case Report’ Genre

The clinical case report is one of the most important genres of written medical discourse, but it has not yet received sufficient coverage in a historical perspective. The material of the present study is the work Centuriae written by Amato Lusitano, a Portuguese physician of the 16th century, containing 700 texts of the named genre. Not being the creator of this genre, Lusitano makes a significant contribution to its popularization and development, which prompts us to explore how this genre is implemented in his work. The article aims to analyze the compositional scheme of a case report and the linguistic means of its presentation characteristic of the 16th century, as well as to compare it with the modern genre canon. The study has found that the obligatory compositional elements of the genre in Lusitano’s work are the title with the designation of the diagnosis or a summary of the content, the main part with a description of the clinical picture and the treatment method, and a conclusion stating the outcome of treatment. The prescription genre is necessarily included in the main part. This scheme is generally identical to the modern one, but its linguistic content, with the exception of the prescription genre, was not yet standardized in the 16th century. The compositional elements equivalent to the introduction and discussion, mandatory for modern articles, are optional for Lusitano. They are introduced in three ways: by references directly in the text, by placing them in scholia, and through dialogization. A characteristic feature of the Centuriae is the availability of information that is redundant from the point of view of specific cases or medicine as such. The study concludes that, with the identity of the case report genre with the modern one, the Renaissance era allows for a greater freedom of this genre in terms of the composition, content, and linguistic representation.